Intro to the Challenge

I'm going to play through 255 of the best games for the GBA. That's 4.9 years at a rate of 1 game/week. I'm not sure whether that's a good estimate yet.

To get the list, I took the games with >=70 score on Metacritic, filtered out some games in genres I don't enjoy (mainly sports simulators and serious racing games). That conveniently came out to 255, and since that's a significant number in gaming, I decided to make that the title/theme of the challenge. Here's the finished list.

This self-challenge was inspired by internet sites like CRPG Addict, who is playing every CRPG ever made in chronological order, and NESMania, where speedrunner "TheMexicanRunner" beat every NES game ever made. I wanted to do something similar for GBA, but (according to Wikipedia) there are over 1000 GBA games, which made playing them all a bit much. So instead I came up with my arbitrary challenge list via the method above.

I've skimmed over the list and here are some thoughts:

Score 90-100 - 14 Games: All classics, and I've played all of them except for the THPS games (and I've played the PlayStation editions of those). Any of these and I'm having a great time frankly, it's really hard to argue with any on this list.

Score 80-89 - 75 Games: Not quite so consistent, but a lot of strong titles especially in the upper half of the bracket. There are some titles on this list that I'm not looking forward to as much though.

Score 70-79 - 166 Games: Now we're getting into a real mixed bag. I know there are some games that I personally love down here that are flawed or lack mass appeal. I'm hoping to find some hidden gems that I don't know about too. However I know there are also going to be some fairly bad games and games that don't appeal to me personally in the mix too. Looks like there are a lot of tie-ins in this list, it's hard to get excited about "Noddy: A Day in Toyland" for example.

General Rules

I'm aiming to at least beat the main story and see the credits of each game. Where that's not applicable for whatever reason (non-story based games for example) my goal is to see the majority of the content on offer to get a good feel for the game.

As a minimum floor I'm going to spend at least 2 hours on the game minimum before giving up, but I would hope not to invoke that clause too often. This may be applied for some games like the "arcade collections" that appear, or other games without well defined ends.

I'm not limiting myself to that however, if I'm motivated to keep playing or 100% a game I will.

No cheats (unless they're given inside the game itself). Avoid the use of FAQs/guides as much as possible, although I will resort to them if I'm irretrievably stuck.

Each game is selected randomly from the list after I'm done with the previous one (I've written a little program to do this for me).

First Game

The first game coming up is The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap. This wasn't randomly picked, because playing it was part of the inspiration to undertake this challenge! The completion post for that should be coming up soon.